Avoiding memory leaks with GtkTreeView
2. September 2007
This is something I noticed playing around in valgrind and seems to be quite common in GTK+ code. When you retrieve a string from a GtkTreeView, YOU are responsible for freeing it:
gchar* my_string
gtk_tree_model_get (model, COLUMN_MY_STRING, &my_string, -1);
g_message ("Printing my string: %s", my_string);
/* Do something more useful
------------------------------- */
g_free (my_string); // Important, otherwise YOU leak memory.
In the hope it is correct and helps some people…
ScanRail
6. August 2007
Today, I am leaving for a 3 weeks trip through Scandinavia using the train. This is rather cheap because of the ScanRail Pass which allows unlimited travel on Scandinavian railways.
My way, though subject to change at any time will bring me to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Gällivare, Östersund, Trondheim, Bergen, Olso, Göteborg and back to Malmö. In case you want to meet me anywhere on this route, send me a mail and hope that I will have Internet access somewhere to read it.
More important, I won’t read any mailings lists, bugzilla reminders, planets, blogs and so on in the next weeks so don’t expect to hear from me apart from private mail which I might have access to but that’s uncertain.
Back home – taking the rain with me
22. July 2007
You thought weather was bad in Birmingham? Forget about it! When I came home (not really…) I saw the most heavy rain ever in my life. The whole region was declared a disaster area and each and every road which could probably have taken me home was flooded.
So after two hours of driving through the night and finding no way to the place where my parents live I ended up driving to my flat in Erlangen which was luckily still reachable. This morning, about 10 hours after the rain stopped, the motorway and the railway is still interrupted and rescue stuff is working all over. But I am finally there after at least some roads are usable again.
Anyway, time to thank some people:
- For the beer: Philip and Dirk-Jan
- For sponsering the trip: Openismus
- For helping me solving the public transport problem and for the interesting talk during
the flight (and for writing all these cool open source articles): Andreas - For giving me a Vala introduction: Jürg
- For beeing awesome: Everybody!
GUADEC notes
20. July 2007
So GUADEC is absolutely rocking. OK, we do not talk about British weather but the rest is absolutely awesome!
Some notes:
- Gtk+ 3.0 (or 4.0) seems to be necessary to make the work for maintainers easier. Anyway, until now I see no real reason for breaking two much of the API. Just break all this stuff which is crap and leave the rest as close to the current API as possible. BTW, the GTK+ developers/maintainers really rock – thank you!
- GOD is definitly a bad acronym for Gnome Online Desktop but we might still have lots of advantages by making all those popular web techniques available for the Desktop. Not really making everything like web but giving the people the choice to use the things they want in an easy to use fashion (Google stuff, YouTube, Flickr, whatever…)
- There are really many people out there fixing the platform and making it ready for the next generation desktop (gvfs, dconf for example)
Unrelated notes:
- danilo persuaded me to join the i18n-list and he definitly made the hardest party on tuesday.
- Vincent seems to be a very important member of the community but nobody really knows what he is doing 🙂
- Behdad should start fixing the bugs if he wants his hat back
- Met lots of other rockstars like Murray, Naba, Philip, Jens, Andreas, MacSlow to mention some
- I am waiting for the power in the ETAP hotel to break down completely because all those people put their notebooks in the same socket and they already broke three.
- For next GUADEC we need l10n for the name plates and they need to contain nicknames
- My talk was not that great, at least IMHO. But people seem to be interested in the project so I hope things will improve!
Anjuta ubuntu repository
20. July 2007
So, as requested in the talk:
1) Add ‘deb http://anjuta.org/apt ./’ in your /etc/apt/sources.list
2) Create a file called /etc/apt/preferences and enter the following:
Package: anjuta
Pin: version 2.*
Pin-Priority: 990
Package: anjuta-common
Pin: version 2.*
Pin-Priority: 990
Package: anjuta-dev
Pin: version 2.*
Pin-Priority: 990
3) sudo apt-get update
4) sudo apt-get install anjuta
(anjuta-dev, if you want to write anjuta plugins)
More to come soon…
GUADEC
16. July 2007
So, I am finally there after lots of air travel security paranoia and the quite difficult exercise to make your way through Birmingham when there are nearly no street signs. That makes any maps (online and offline) quite useless.
Soccer was really funny today, thanks for organizing this and congratulation to the blue team!
BTW, if you are in the ETAP lobby, just turn around, I sit right in the middle 😉
Preparing GUADEC
12. July 2007
So, I finally got most things done:
- Exchange some pounds
- International Student ID card
- Flight, Hotel
- Presentation (well, at least half-way)
So, still to do is packing, book train to flight in case they decide not to be on strike on monday. Search for some alternative otherwise :(.
Anyway, dear Ex-White team, I will be a bit late because I will arrive in Birmingham not until Monday noon. I hope to be at the pitch at about 2:30 pm, but maybe it will take longer to find my way through Birmingham!
Robot
2. July 2007
Some of you may have been wondered that I haven’t blogged for weeks. Well, it has been a quite busy time working on a robot for university:
The challenge was to follow a double-line on a DIN A4 sheet and to draw a line in between with a pen. The budget was limited to 200 Euro and time was from mid of April until end of June. We worked in group with 8 persons. Nothing else was given except the optional chance to get a ready to use AVR board for controlling.
So, the first choice was if we wanted to create a plotter/printer like device or rather a mobile one. We decided to take the mobile approach because it simply seemed more fun. Mechanics were rather simple as we used two stepper motors without any gearing. The wheels are put on each side to be able to do a 360° turn without moving the pen in the centre:
For detecting the lines we used three CNY70 infrared sensors after we failed with line sensor. The currents from the sensors are converted using a simple op-amp circuit and connected to the digital ports of the ATMega16 processor. Most of the electric stuff on the photo is just used to drive the step motors.
Programming all this was rather tricky because a simple microcontroller with 1 KB SRAM and 16 KB Flash is really different to the normal desktop programming I am used to. Luckily there is a gcc for this AVR processors.
In the end we took a too high risk at the presentation and lost the track at the last curve. We had to use a slower program to reach the end. So we did not get the price for the fastest solution but at least the subjective price for the most beautiful robot.
You can watch our presentation video on YouTube!
Scratchbox support for anjuta
25. May 2007
Today, I added a very simple feature to anjuta which makes it possible to build your project inside a scratchbox environment. It does not take care about execution and debugging yet but that’s not so important for me at the moment.
The last weeks I mostly hacked on drag-and-drop layout support for glom. It is far from finished at the moment and anyone is free to make suggestions how improve the whole dnd handling.
Today, I heading for the German Cup-Final in Berlin tommorow and I hope Nuremberg will win it’s first title after 39 years (including several years in the second and even one in the third league).
Heading for Birmingham
29. April 2007
Well, I have been lucky and my proposal was accepted for the after hours of GUADEC.
To be honest, I have no idea how to get there and how to stay but I guess I will figure this out later. It is also my first presentation outside school/university and definitly the first in English but it’s going to be interesting.
The travel information on the GUADEC website is not yet very detailed. I miss some information about hostels or hotels for example but I hope it will improve.